Does your redevelopment project affect your current tenants? Learn what you must do to help your tenants, and access applicant checklists and templates.

Why we protect tenants and rental housing

Renters make up over half of Vancouver households and are crucial to the city's social, cultural, and economic vibrancy. Rising housing costs and low rental-housing vacancy rates mean that tenants may have difficulty finding and affording suitable housing. This difficulty increases when tenants have to move because their building gets renovated or redeveloped.

Keeping Vancouver's neighborhoods accessible and diverse means ensuring that tenants have stable and affordable housing choices with access to jobs, schools, and community services.

To help do this, we focus on:

Preserving and renewing the city's rental housing supply using our Rental Housing Stock Official Development Plan (23 KB), also known as our Rate of Change Policy. This regulation requires redevelopment projects with six or more rental housing units in zones with a high proportion of rental housing (RM, FM, and CD-1 zones) to replace every demolished rental unit.

Protecting tenants who are displaced due to redevelopment using our Tenant Relocation and Protection Policy

Tenant Relocation and Protection Policy

The policy gives protection and assistance to tenants who must move if their building is redeveloped.

Owners or developers need to provide a tenant relocation plan or tenant impact statement when they apply to the City for rezoning or for development permits. City staff are responsible for reviewing this plan as part of the application process to ensure it meets the standards set in the policy.

A tenant relocation plan describes how a landlord or developer must help tenants who need to move.

A tenant impact statement commits a landlord or developer to completing renovations while tenants remain on the site if they don't expect the work will require displacement of tenants. If the work requires tenants to be displaced, then the landlord or developer must provide a tenant relocation plan.

The policy was approved by City Council on December 10, 2015, and took effect on February 15, 2016. It replaces the Rate of Change Guidelines (90 KB). Rezoning and development permit applications received before February 15, 2016, will be processed under the Rate of Change Guidelines.

The policy supplements the BC Residential Tenancy Act (RTA) that sets out legal rights and responsibilities of landlords and tenants in BC. The BC Residential Tenancy Branch resolves disputes between landlords and tenants under the RTA.